The present invention is directed to a system and method for matching experts and expertise with persons requiring expert services and more particularly for a system and method for doing such matching by use of a database of experts' areas of expertise and times of availability.
The increasing complexity of product development and business building in the biosciences (biotech, pharmaceutical and medical device industry) requires more and more integration of specialized knowledge to achieve business goals. Overall R&D expenditures in the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotech industry in the US alone are more than $50 billion annually, out of which about $4-5 billion are currently being outsourced to outside vendors. The main outside service providers are clinical research organizations and specialized service providers in other aspects of product development and post-marketing activities. In addition, many individual consultants provide services to customers.
The trend for outsourcing of product development and post-marketing activities in the bio-sciences is accelerating as companies try to concentrate more and more on core competencies and outsource other activities.
Product development (new drugs, medical devices and biologics) is an expensive and time-consuming business. It is heavily regulated by government authorities in virtually all countries in the world, with the European and US authorities setting the framework for data generation, scientific review and marketing authorization standards. Because of the similarities in product development and product maintenance, the underlying strategies for data generation and assembly of supportive dossiers for product approval purposes are virtually identical in nature in all industrialized countries of the world, specifically in the US, Canada, Australia, the European countries and Japan. Other Asian countries and countries in South America follow the lead of these countries.
The time to market—from product concept through marketing approval by a government agency—is critical to the overall return on investment for firms that develop new products. Typical product development cost range from $50 million to $ 300 million for pharmaceuticals and biotech products, and less for medical devices (depending on the use of the device), and development times range from 2 years to more than 10 years.
Any shortening of the time frame required to bring products to market will result not only in a competitive advantage (“first to market”), resulting in a larger market share than competitors that enter the market later, but also in an improved return on investment. Shortened development times will then translate into higher product profitability, earlier break even on the R&D investment, and a higher profitability of the enterprise with all its positive impact on earnings per share and subsequently share price.
This is certainly not a new insight, and companies have tried to address this issue by outsourcing more and more developmental activities (pre-clinical studies, clinical development) in an effort to tighten the developmental timelines and reduce cost for internal personnel needed for an efficient in-house development.
With the ever increasing number of service providers, customers (pharmaceutical, medical device and biotech firms) now have a choice among several service providers in the same service segment. However, the marketplace for services is very inefficient and relies heavily on conventional sales and business development activities on the part of service providers. That inefficiency contributes to a bloated cost structure of these service provider. That cost, of course, is ultimately borne by the corporate customer (the firm using service providers) and thus offsets somewhat the desired savings on the part of the customer. Even with high cash payments to purchase services, customers still have the hope of an improved product development and time to approval as compared to an in-house development.
However, in reality, comparisons between the cost-structure, corporate performance and track record, as well as available resources and their training standard, are not always made by the customer, mainly because the task of selecting a service provider is very complex and time consuming for internal personnel. This involvement of key personnel may in fact slow down other activities in product development so that the net effect of using outside service providers as far as time savings is concerned, may not be that significant as hope for by the customer.
Customers usually do not have access to broad comparisons of different service providers, including their strengths and weaknesses, unless they go through a usually time consuming selection and verification process. In addition, it is uncommon for customers to have an overview over pricing information for comparable services among service providers as well as information on available capacity of service providers at a given time. It may very well be that excess capacity of a certain service provider may result in a price break for a customer, so that the service provider is able at least to sell the available capacity at a reduced rate rather than not sell it at all. Conversely, in times of full utilization of capacity in the service provider universe, capacity for certain services may be available only at a premium and may only be allocated to the party willing to pay that premium because internal time constraints require a tradeoff between more expenses today or a later product market introduction with delayed revenue stream in the future.
Solutions to some of the above problems have been sought on the Internet. In recent years, as the Internet and especially the World Wide Web have attracted the attention of commercial interests, many venues have been formed to match users with complementary goals. In Usenet newsgroups, and later on Web sites, people have offered or sought everything from antique fountain pens to love. Such matching has also extended to the matching of those offering expert skills with those requiring such skills. Two such systems are taught in U.S. Pat. No. 5,862,223 to Walker et al and U.S. Pat. No. 5,948,054 to Nielsen.
Walker et al teaches a system and method for matching experts with customers. A customer can log onto the system and successively choose a subject area (e.g., medicine), a subcategory (e.g., pediatrics), an expert level (e.g., a general practitioner), and an individual expert or experts. The experts' qualifications beyond the subject area, the subcategory, and the expert level are stored in an expert qualifications database, which can be in multimedia form (e.g., text, video, audio) and transmitted to customers; alternatively, the system can search the expert qualifications database through any of a variety of search protocols to weed out, e.g., mathematicians who have not published papers in number theory. The price and time frame can be included in the customer's question, but the time frame is limited to a “response time ≦2.0 hours” format. The selected experts are notified and have the opportunity to submit bids. The expert's answer is routed through the system, which also handles payment. Nielsen teaches a matchmaking system in which customers having questions are matched with experts. However, the matching is done between a the customer's natural-language question and a natural-language statement of each expert's qualifications. Also, the times during which each expert will be available are not stored.
Another problem occurs when a person, such as a physician, wishes to obtain information a product by its trade name. The person wishing the information must determine the name of the manufacturer using the trade name, locate contact information and use that contact information to ask the question. That process is time-consuming, and if the manufacturer is a large corporation with multiple locations, the question may not reach anyone qualified to answer it.
One possible solution to that problem is taught by U.S. Pat. No. 5,913,210 to Call. Call teaches an Internet system for delivering information about products from the source of those products. A product code translator stores cross-references between UPC codes and Internet addresses for locations of information about the products. When an incoming query is received, a table lookup function is performed for a set of UPC codes comprising the code or codes contained in the query. If there is a match, the URL's found in the search are returned to the person submitting the query. If the URL for a particular company is an e-mail address, the e-mail can be forwarded to the company. Alternatively, the URL can be a Web page of product information.
However, Call has the following shortcomings. First, the SMTP server simply generates and sends an e-mail message; there is no tracking of the status of responses. Second, the person submitting the query must have a sample of the product handy in its original packaging or otherwise be able to find out the UPC. Third, while it would be useful to integrate such a system with one for allowing queries to go in the opposite direction, there is no such integration.